Coming Attractions: Children's Literature in January

By -
When the Classics Club got started, the hosts came up with a list of fun ideas for events and asked for volunteer hosts.  I jumped at the chance to do a children's literature celebration in January 2013.  I have quite a lot of children's books rattling around in my head, and I'm looking forward to the chance to share them!  (If I run out, I'll ask my mom, who knows much more than I do on the subject.)



Throughout the month, I'll be writing up pieces on classic children's authors.  Most of them will be lesser-known people so we can enjoy learning about some new people, but I may well throw in some more famous folks as well--so many of them had very interesting lives!


Amanda at Simpler Pastimes will be hosting a general children's literature readalong, with an optional focus on George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin.  Go check out her post and see what's up!  We'll both be posting a list of children's literature that we love and recommend for you to try.  For this event, we've decided to limit the menu to books written pre-1960.  This is a bit difficult for me to do, since it means leaving out some of my favorite modern writers, but this way we'll get to know more wonderful books that may have been undeservedly forgotten lately.

Amanda has also made these gorgeous logos for us.  I can't even get over how beautiful they are.  She has larger versions of all the images available upon request, and information about the original images is at her blog post.  Please pick one (or two!) to post on your blog with links to our blogs, and we'll get the party started!




Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 5, 2012 at 9:29 PM

    Looks like fun! I'll definitely be reading your posts, even if I can't do the readalong.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanDecember 5, 2012 at 11:08 PM

    Thanks Emily!

    ReplyDelete
  3. S.December 6, 2012 at 4:46 AM

    Thank you, thank you, thank you for linking to this one!! I was just thinking yesterday how I'd like a children's literature challenge, and bing bang boom -- here one is :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. ArenelDecember 6, 2012 at 4:46 AM

    Very interesting! I'll be following the posts, and I hope I'll b able to join the readalong!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Adriana@ClassicalQuestDecember 6, 2012 at 5:06 PM

    This sounds really fun Jean! I can't wait!

    ReplyDelete
  6. JeanDecember 6, 2012 at 5:12 PM

    I'm glad to see the interest! (Phew, I'm not yelling into the empty vacuum of space...)

    ReplyDelete
  7. amanda @ simplerpastimesDecember 6, 2012 at 5:13 PM

    Thank you for the compliments on the logos, Jean. I had fun putting them together.

    Heh, now that you mention favorite post-1960 writers, I've got a mental list of a dozen or so more recent books I'd love to read/reread. Guess that'll be February....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more